Never let it be said news must be “new” — Charles Arthur October 31, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentCharles Arthur addresses the "isn't news meant to be new?" question, with reference to Brand, Osborne/Mandelson and more:
"I’ve seen criticisms saying “But everyone had ignored it until the Mail on Sunday ran its story - it was old news! It was nothing until they got onto it!”
Surprisingly, some of this came from journalists. The fact is, of course, that (in newspapers) “news is what the reader doesn’t yet know, but you can persuade them they want to”. Doesn’t matter if it’s ten minutes, ten days or ten years (even ten decades) old."
‘Google will not replace shoe leather’ October 20, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentVeteran investigative reporter Andrew Jennings interviewed:
“Google has its uses. But let’s get serious. It is a fine research tool, but it doesn’t do what a journalist is supposed to do… Shoe leather is cheap. That’s how I get the story. If you walk down any suburban street, there is a story behind every door. There are people who work in factories, good people, that bad things happened to, and they are waiting for a knock on the door… […]
Many journalists think you get it from the Presidents or press releases. You get it from the janitor, the concierge, the guy who is a driver to Mr. Enron. It’s ordinary people who want to talk about it because they have to earn a living, but it’s shoe leather. Google can help, but you have to go out to get the story, and get people to trust you. Whether it is in any type of journalism: economy, sports, etc, people have stories. You have to persuade them.”
Why journalists failed to predict the banking crisis October 14, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, News, reporting, science , 1 comment so farThe developments that led to the current banking crisis seem to have been incremental, took place over a number of years, and together affected the whole system. Is that why journalists failed to see its demise?
I wonder about the role of human psychology, as one of many possible factors that worked against the reporting on developments that contributed to the current crisis.
…the most important “defaults” of the human mind are to look for discrepancies in the world, to ignore what is going on constantly, and to respond quickly to sudden shifts, to emergencies, to scarcity, to the immediate and personal, to “news”.
So wrote psychologist Robert Ornstein and biologist Paul Ehrlich in New World, New Mind nearly 20 years ago. They argue that the human brain is poorly equipped to tackle many modern challenges: still primitive, it responds primarily to dramatic sensory changes (fight or flight and all that). In contrast, contemporary issues that tend to be evident mostly through gradual changes are seen as less significant or urgent.
For millions of years these “defaults” of the mind have worked well. They do not work well in a world where 2 billion people could be killed by a simple misjudgment, and our defaults do not even work so well in the day-to-day world of modern life…
Ornstein and Ehrlich focused on environmental change — but perhaps their theory applies validly to other areas, too. A psychology of news values in journalism? You read it here first. Probably.
There’s a tenuous link with some of the more familiar factors being put forward. Alex Brummer, the Daily Mail’s City editor, says few financial journalists understood the systemic problems that were piling up. He also highlighted the difficulties for journalists in dealing with powerful PR and threats of having access withdrawn:
Brummer says that too many financial journalists are bamboozled by the ‘manipulative’ PR operations of big companies, and some are too fearful that they will lose access if they are too critical. ‘The duty of a journalist is always to be sceptical. But they are up against very powerful institutions who lie and cheat.’
James Robertson, who wrote the piece, also quotes Dan Bögler, the FT’s managing editor, on why his paper didn’t do better:
Why didn’t we spot it? Unfortunately, financial journalists — and the FT has better-trained financial journalists than others — don’t really understand this stuff, and they join a long list of people that starts with bank regulators, central bank regulators and money managers.
No journalists appear on the list of ten people who “predicted the financial meltdown”, compiled by the Money Central blog at Times Online (tagline: Advice you can bank on). Perhaps no surprise there, although there are some honourable exceptions, such as those mentioned in the comments on that post.
Will Algorithms Make Human Editors Obsolete? Not If Journalists Collaborate - Publishing 2.0 October 13, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentScott Karp makes his case for more collaboration. My query: what happens to competition and to the revenue side of the equation?
"…while algorithms may excel at processing vast amounts of data by brute force, they are only as smart as the rules we give them. Algorithms can simulate human intelligence — but algorithms have no judgment — and certainly no news judgment. Algorithms can’t do link journalism. […]
Imagine if journalists and news orgs brought together their combined editorial intelligence, their combined news judgment.
Suddenly the advantage of an algorithm’s scale in filtering the web doesn’t seem so insurmountable. […]
…the idea that news orgs can accomplish more together than they can by themselves isn’t so foreign to journalism — it’s the basis of the newswire. So it’s not that hard to imagine a collaborative newswire based on links, where journalists help each other filter the web."
The Twitter-isation of the news — andrewlewin: let me think about that October 12, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentTwitter comes of age?
“Ironically then, it seems that microblogging is a return to actual reporting of fast moving events, while the other pieces are analysis or comment that have become confused/synonymous with journalism only in the last couple of decades. Journalism has come home to the future, and it matches perfectly the emerging online set-up: live text is to Twitter as analysis/comment is to blogs.”
Does online-only news narrow readers’ understanding? | The Australian October 12, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentThat’s what an Australian ad/comms agency suggests, drawing on its survey of 200 people:
“…by using online as an exclusive source of news people are starting to consume more information but — and this is the important point — across fewer topic areas. […]
…as consumers of news we’re becoming increasingly intelligent or knowledgeable about very niche topic areas, but from an overall perspective, our understanding of world and national events is a bit more superficial. […]
…70.1 per cent claimed that the internet allows them to avoid news topics that are not of interest. […]
…online news readers are not typically venturing outside the same few topics or information areas — 59.9 per cent tend to read information from the same sections.[…] However, 62.7 per cent of people claim that when they buy a paper they often read articles that they hadn’t intended to.”
FT editor Lionel Barber: Why journalism wins my vote October 11, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a comment"…the mainstream press lost touch with its audience at the very moment when technology, via the internet, was dramatically lowering the barriers to entry.[…]
…a shift in the balance of power towards new media, with wholesale repercussions for the practice of journalism.[…]
…whether this same journalistic rigour can survive the current maelstrom.
… the role of the trained journalist as trusted intermediary no longer holds. Some may argue that this privileged status was always precarious, even a fiction. […]
Yet to abandon the quest to write the first draft of history carries risks. There will always be powerful forces seeking to suppress injustice or inconvenient truths. For all their failings, newspapers, especially the well-financed family-owned newspapers, have served as a counterweight. On both sides of the Atlantic, the line between news reporting and comment is becoming increasingly blurred. That is something that should give everyone in the profession pause for thought."
BBC extends UGC efforts with dedicated reporter — BBC NEWS | The Editors October 11, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentA more proactive approach to developing stories based on user-generated content, it seems:
"[W]e've started a pilot to report more of the stories you're sending us while at the same time making a bigger effort to reach out and join in conversations on the web […]
…we've decided to try out a reporter whose beat is simply all the content you've been sending in to us - our first Interactive Reporter.
Siobhan Courtney has been with us for a fortnight now and has already scored two major successes […]
…on Tuesday night we experimented by opening up channels on video chatrooms Qik, 12Seconds and Phreadz to join in conversations wherever they were happening rather than expect people to come to us and host them on the BBC's platforms."
Twitter for reporting - Living in a Media World October 11, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentRalph Hanson offers some examples of reporters using Twitter (for their work, that is):
"twittering is also being used by reporters and news bloggers to post news links. There are political debates taking place by Twitter. Barack Obama's campaign has an official Twitter feed. St. Paul Pioneer Press technology reporter Julio Ojeda Zapata uses Twitter as a reporting tool. And bloggers covering live events (such as the Republican National Convention) use Twitter to make blog posts from their smartphones. In fact, the busiest outside link to my blog in August came from a Tweet posted to Fishbowl DC during the RNC."
The news about Robert Peston: meta-reporting? October 9, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, News, blogging, reporting , add a commentUpdate: Michael Howard has asked the FSA to investigate the alleged leaking to Peston/the BBC of sensitive information about the bank rescue package, reports Guido Fawkes.
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The BBC’s business editor is becoming the news, and not just as in the spoof article I bookmarked previously.
The House of Lords communications committee asks whether he’s setting the agenda:
“Well, I think there is an argument for that. One can’t deny that Robert Peston has been playing an instrumental role in the story and anyone in the news business has to pay close attention to what Robert Peston reports,” the Daily Mail political editor, Ben Brogan, told the committee.
“He is well informed, well connected and he has on a number of occasions broken the news it would be foolish in the extreme to ignore him. That, in some ways, gives him an enormous degree of power. But more power to his elbow, if he’s the journalist that is leading the charge on this, then good for him.”
More people want to find him online, says Robin Goad of Hitwise…
while he reports on falling markets, his own stock is looking like a good bet. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet searches for ‘robert peston’ have shot up over the last month.
…which prompts a Media Guardian article on a similar theme, followed by a light piece about Peston’s potential rivals.
Journalists and media-watchers have also had the chance to read interview profiles of Peston in The Independent and The Guardian. Both allude to his contacts and brilliant scoops, of course — but don’t address directly how far he’s managing to steer the narrow course between reporter of scoops and cypher.
Footnote: Yesterday I read Peston’s blog post and not much later listened to his analysis piece on the 6pm Radio 4 news, and realised they were the same thing. So posting scripts is one way to do it, to answer Robin Goad’s query of how Peston was broadcasting frequently and
somehow also finding time update his blog daily with analysis of the latest episode in the ongoing saga of the financial crisis
I doubt I’m the first to realise this.